Although plant breeding programs worldwide have made considerable progress developing new cultivars with improved disease resistances, yields and other, useful traits, breeding as a whole relies on screening numerous plants to identify novel, desirable characteristics. Very large numbers of progeny from crosses often must be grown and evaluated over several years in order to select one or a few plants with a desired combination of traits.
Standard breeding of diploid plants often requires screening and back-crossing of a large number of plants to achieve the desired genotype. One solution to the problem of screening large numbers of progeny has been to produce haploid plants, the chromosomes of which can be doubled using colchicine or other means to achieve instantly homozygous, doubled-haploid plants.
Thus, marked improvements in the economics of breeding can be achieved via doubled haploid production, since selection and other procedural efficiencies can be markedly improved by using true-breeding (homozygous) progenies. With doubled haploid production systems, homozygosity is achieved in one generation. Thus, the breeder can eliminate the numerous cycles of inbreeding necessary by conventional methods to achieve practical levels of homozygosity. Indeed, true homozygosity for all traits is not even achievable by conventional breeding methods.